About

Photo by Danny Duan

Yinan Wang 王一男, documentary photographer and film maker, was born in Beijing. His works explore minority worlds in China, and the United States.

Beginning his career as a cinematographer, Yinan worked on Kalagutageand The Salt Well Naxi People. Both of these highly regarded ethnographic studies document the day-to-day lives and cultures of Indigenous peoples in China

Working for the China State Administration of Cultural Heritage, Yinan produced a documentary for the Third National Survey on Cultural Heritage, in which he and his team created a complete an acoustic image archive for the sake of preservation of new found immovable cultural relics. During the course of production, Yinan traveled to 34 provinces in China, including multiple trips to Yunnan, Tibet, and the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.

After 5 years of intensive filmmaking – in order to support his ethnographic work, Yinan also maintained an active presence in commercial filmmaking, Producing, directing, shooting, and editing all kinds of music videos, ads, and promotion pieces.In 2015 Yinan returned to school, enrolling in the Department of Film, Video, Animation and New Genres at University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. There he explored different forms of film art. He shot his first experimental film, Deer Queen by Brooke Thiele and he made his first animation, Misfortune Comes Bliss, with Owen Klatte. Finally, Yinan made his first feature documentary, Yen Ching--about an immigrant family and their American-Chinese restaurant -- with the help of Professor Dick Blau and Professor Cecelia Condit. Now he is a current MFA candidate in Film at Temple University in Philadelphia.